<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>Darkmatter by too_much_in_the_sun</title>
<style type="text/css">

body { background-color: #ffffff; }
.CI {
text-align:center;
margin-top:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
padding:0px;
}
.center   {text-align: center;}
.cover    {text-align: center;}
.full     {width: 100%; }
.quarter  {width: 25%; }
.smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
.u        {text-decoration: underline;}
.bold     {font-weight: bold;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27773656">Darkmatter</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/too_much_in_the_sun/pseuds/too_much_in_the_sun'>too_much_in_the_sun</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Maximum Ride - James Patterson</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Dark, Angst, Death, Gen, Mad Science, quantum immortality</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-06</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-06</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 23:40:52</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Major Character Death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>12,084</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27773656</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/too_much_in_the_sun/pseuds/too_much_in_the_sun</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Something went wrong with the project to create the Voice.</p><p>Very wrong.</p><p>AU.</p><blockquote>
  <p>This is a ghost story; I am the ghost.</p>
</blockquote>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Chapter 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>The title is from "Darkmatter" by Andrew Bird.</p><p>Content warnings: suicidal ideation and attempted suicide.</p><hr/><p><em>What is a ghost? Something dead that seems to be</em><br/><em>alive. Something dead that doesn't know it's dead.</em><br/>“Landscape with Fruit Rot and Millipede” - Richard Siken</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p class="western">My name is Jeb Batchelder. Hi.</p>
<p class="western">You already know some of what I’m going to tell you. You don’t know all of it, though – and besides, I need to tell this story to someone. And that someone is you.</p>
<p class="western">Beginning in 2001, I was involved in a very strange project. Faced with a need for better control of our avian-human recombinants, we hit on a method to create a direct connection between two users: one recombinant, one handler. I could go into more technical detail, but the essence of it was this: a tiny microchip implanted in the right temporal lobe, which, once healed, created the ability to sustain a telepathic connection. Max, being the oldest surviving subject, was the first to receive a chip.</p>
<p class="western">I volunteered to be the second, to serve as her handler, but I think you know that, well, there’s volunteering and there’s “volunteering”. In the grand scheme of things, I was about as enthusiastic about it as she was.</p>
<p class="western">I just didn’t want it to be someone else.</p>
<p class="western">There were side effects, of course. For one thing, it wasn’t as effective as we had hoped, and in one aspect it was an outright failure. I couldn’t directly control Max’s actions. I had some awareness of her location, and I could communicate with her, but I had no direct influence on what she did. It was hardly worth the effort of brain surgery – which had been minimally invasive, as far as brain surgery goes, but still far from a pleasant experience – when a simple tracking chip would have sufficed. So plans to expand the project and chip the rest of the flock in the same way were shelved.</p>
<p class="western">And there was one more thing.</p>
<p class="western">The first time I died was in March 2001, a week after the surgery. I was washing dishes one night, then found myself half-crouched in a corner of the kitchen, braced against the counter. My hands were still wet. The pot I had been washing was still in the sink.</p>
<p class="western">“Everything just went black,” I could tell you. That would be a lie. Things didn’t go black; I didn’t see a bright light, didn’t leave my body. One moment I was scrubbing tomato sauce off of a pot, the next I was across the room, feeling light-headed and disoriented.</p>
<p class="western">I blamed it on stress and overwork, and went on with my life.</p>
<p class="western">I only know that I died then, I only <em>say</em> that I died, because later that year, it happened again.</p>
<p class="western">It happened that fall, a week before I was due to leave with the flock.</p>
<p class="western">I was still in the process of putting my things into storage, getting things ready to leave for however long I might be gone. I remember I was driving back to my apartment in Darwin from the storage facility in Ridgecrest – it’s not a long drive by any means, but it seems longer when you’re driving through those desert hills in the dark. I’d just taken up a mixed carful of most of my books and a lot of my dishes. Things I couldn’t take with me on the long drive to Colorado.</p>
<p class="western">Have you ever been driving and wondered what would happen if you drove into the ditch, right now... or right now? Looked at the speedometer and realized that you’d have a pretty good chance of dying if you drifted just a little to the side and hit another car, or the center divider? Almost <em>seen</em> the accident play out in your mind, before you can stop yourself from thinking about it?</p>
<p class="western">That happens to me a lot. I can’t help myself – my brain starts to think of these possibilities and I can’t stop.</p>
<p class="western">What happened that night was this: on that lonely desert road between Ridgecrest and Darwin, on that cool fall night, I glanced over at the side of the road and thought, <em>What if I went off the road on this corner? What if? It could happen. It happens all the time. I’m going fast enough that if I hit something down there and wrecked the car, I’d probably die before anyone got out here and saw me.</em></p>
<p class="western">The idea of it had a terrible sort of appeal. It would be the end of all my problems, the solution to everything – as close as the shadowy dropoff of the right-hand shoulder. In the dark it was just an inky abyss, an absolute absence of light, but I knew it was a hell of a drop.</p>
<p class="western"><em>I wouldn’t even have to see it coming</em>, I thought. <em>It would be so easy.</em> It was like I wasn’t really in control anymore. Like a dream. I turned off the headlights and let go of the wheel.</p>
<p class="western">I remember that, as the front of the car began to tilt out into space, in the moment I felt the front tires lose their grip on the asphalt, the dashboard clock ticked over from 10:12 to 10:13.</p>
<p class="western"><em>Oh man, </em>I thought, as I passed the point of no return, <em>that’s the last time I’ll see that happen</em> -</p>
<p class="western">It wasn’t a long fall. Long enough, I guess, for me to feel a dumb, animal shock as a vast, dark blur loomed up in front of me – long enough for my body to register, too late to do anything about it, that it was about to die. That feeling of shock and betrayal – that’s the last thing I remember.</p>
<p class="western">Then I gasped and slammed on the brakes.</p>
<p class="western">I hadn’t made the turn yet. Ahead of me the headlights illuminated a lifeless, gently sloping stretch of asphalt, bordered on each side by rolling desert hills. In the shadow of a scrub oak I saw, for a moment, the shining eyes of some nocturnal animal. Up ahead the road curved softly up into the night.</p>
<p class="western">The dashboard clock read 10:03.</p>
<p class="western">“What the fuck,” I said aloud – just thinking it didn’t feel like enough. “What the fuck just happened?”</p>
<p class="western">After that, I couldn’t convince myself it was just stress. Something was happening to me.</p>
<p class="western">I hoped it would go away on its own, that it was an artifact of having a foreign object embedded in my brain and would stop happening as I healed. I was an adult and my brain no longer had the kind of neuroplasticity that Max’s did. That had to be it.</p>
<p class="western">And I almost convinced myself of that, because during the two years I was able to spend with the flock in Colorado, it didn’t happen again. Not once.</p>
<p class="western">Then I had to leave. I fought the order the best that I could, but there was only so much I could do to resist. They at least had the decency to give the final order face-to-face; before I left I had agreed to monthly check-ins, some of them in-person.</p>
<p class="western">I’d come into town that day to go to the grocery store, just for a few things that hadn’t been in our monthly delivery order. I remember Iggy had asked for soup. Campbell’s chicken noodle, the classic.</p>
<p class="western">They met me in the parking lot. As soon as I got out of my car, while I was looking over my list. It was the same kind of team I’d gotten used to seeing: the standard working pair of Erasers, one veteran and one newbie. They should have been out of place in a King Soopers parking lot, should have attracted attention – two tall, handsome young men in black suits, in a little mountain town where blue jeans are appropriate attire for any social occasion. Yet no one looked twice at them, or at me.</p>
<p class="western">The younger one greeted me. “Doctor Batchelder,” he said. “Pleased to meet you.” He sounded like he’d practiced saying it the whole way there from California.</p>
<p class="western">“Yeah. Nice to meet you too. Everything’s fine,” I said. “You’re here a little early – my notes are back at the house, I wasn’t expecting you until Tuesday.”</p>
<p class="western">“Of course,” said the veteran. Just two words, but they dripped with that dangerous Eraser blend of kindliness and iron-hard strength. It’s a strangely sweet kind of voice, the kind that’s hard to forget.</p>
<p class="western">The newbie hadn’t quite mastered it yet. His voice sounded uneven when he said, “Doctor Batchelder. It’s time for you to come home.”</p>
<p class="western">A bitter taste filled my mouth, and I had to swallow hard to get rid of it. “No,” I said, “not yet – I was approved for eight years, and maybe an extension – Angel’s only four, they’re not <em>ready</em> to go back.”</p>
<p class="western">“There’s no need for concern,” said the veteran, leaning in closer to me and slipping a comradely arm around my shoulders. “They’ll be taken care of. They’ll be fine.”</p>
<p class="western">He sounded so reasonable, and his voice was so soft and cajoling – a voice that made you feel at ease, made you want to agree with its owner. We’d designed it that way – but knowing that didn’t make it any easier to fight back.</p>
<p class="western">“They’ll be just fine,” the newbie echoed. Past his shoulder, I saw a woman walking to her car, carrying a jug of milk. She saw me – she made eye contact with me, and for a moment I held her gaze, hoping she’d do something, say something, make this <em>stop</em> -</p>
<p class="western">The veteran’s arm tightened around my shoulders.</p>
<p class="western">“It’s not them we need back, Doctor,” he said, in that quiet, loathsomely reasonable voice. “It’s you.”</p>
<p class="western">The woman looked away from me and kept walking. Above us the sky was a perfect, untroubled blue, hemmed in by the mountains.</p>
<p class="western">“<em>Just</em> you,” said the newbie.</p>
<p class="western">“And you can make this easy, or you can make it hard,” the veteran continued. “You can be a good boy and come with us. Or you can try and run – but we’ll find you. No matter where you go, we’ll find you.” He had leaned in more closely, until his mouth almost touched my ear. “We’ll find you, and then we’ll go after them. And who knows? Anything could happen.”</p>
<p class="western">“Accidents happen, Doctor,” said the newbie. There was an intent, studious look in his eyes that I didn’t like at all. “You’ve been trusted with the care of some very valuable Itex property. But – accidents do happen, and property gets damaged. It’d be a shame, though.”</p>
<p class="western">“So what’ll it be?” said the veteran. His hot breath puffed past my ear. I could smell his sweat. My mouth had gone dry now. I remembered telling Fang that I would be right back.</p>
<p class="western">“I -” I began, and had to stop. “I’ll come,” I said. “Even though it’s early, I’ll come. Just please don’t hurt them.” And I sounded so weak, so fucking <em>weak</em>, even to myself. But I had no chance against them, no chance at all, and I knew that – even if I tried to fight back, the veteran wouldn’t have any trouble at all killing me right here in this parking lot. It was the middle of the day on a Wednesday. Who would see? And then it was just an hour’s drive to the house.</p>
<p class="western">“We won’t hurt them if we don’t have to,” said the veteran, and he let me go. “Get back in your car. You’ll follow us south out of town. We’ll stop just before the highway turnoff, and you’ll get further instructions there.”</p>
<p class="western">I think you’ll understand if I tell you that I don’t remember much of that drive, not after ditching my car on the edge of town. I don’t think I <em>drove</em> most of it – though it’s a long way from southern Colorado to California, even with the Erasers driving in round-the-clock shifts.</p>
<p class="western">It happened again the first night I spent back in California.</p>
<p class="western">The School had put me up in a hotel in Darwin. In the morning, I was told, I had a meeting with my boss, and there was no need to worry about anything after that. It would all be taken care of, the veteran Eraser had told me, and I couldn’t help but wonder if that meant they were finally done with me, if I was headed for a shallow grave in the desert.</p>
<p class="western">Itex had never done that before, as far as I knew – but then again, the point of dealing with recalcitrant employees that way is that they cease to be a problem. Had I been a problem? I worried that I had.</p>
<p class="western">The Erasers were in the room next door. They’d been relatively nice to me, nicer than I expected – they’d stopped at my storage unit on the way into town so that I could get some clothes I hadn’t been wearing for a day and a half. After nervously rifling through boxes under close supervision, I’d managed to pull some things together, and they’d driven to the hotel.</p>
<p class="western">I think they didn’t quite know how to handle me, looking back. Erasers are security guards first and foremost, and they excel at it. But they’re not so good at dealing with problems that don’t respond to force – their training doesn’t really cover it. When it came to transporting a hostage cross-country, they knew what to do... but they weren’t quite so clear on what to do when that hostage was technically their superior.</p>
<p class="western">Once they’d checked into the hotel, they walked me back to my room, and watched me lay my hastily-grabbed bag of clothes down next to the bed. The younger one wished me goodnight, and reminded me to be ready to leave at seven the next morning. “Nothing to worry about,” he said, and then, shyly, “I’m looking forward to working with you now that you’re back.”</p>
<p class="western">“Thanks,” I said. He left, leaving me in the room with the veteran, who looked at me with a steadiness that did not at all reflect the fact that he’d just driven across the country and back.</p>
<p class="western">“Let me give you a word of advice, Doctor,” he said.</p>
<p class="western">“I’m listening.” I wasn’t. My head hurt, and I wanted nothing more than a shower and to sleep, ideally, forever.</p>
<p class="western">“Don’t think about running away.” His voice was quiet. Most Erasers are soft-spoken, which some people find surprising. They’re perfectly willing to escalate when they think it’s necessary, but as a rule they prefer to start things off peacefully. It’s easier to clean up that way. “Don’t think about them at all, if you can help it. There’s every chance you’ll see them again, if you play your cards right. But if you try to go back now, you’ll just put them at risk, and I don’t think you want that.”</p>
<p class="western">“No,” I said. “No, I don’t.” There was a foul, acrid taste in my mouth.</p>
<p class="western">“Of course you don’t.” He smiled. “Goodnight, Doctor. I’ll see you in the morning. If you need anything, just knock.”</p>
<p class="western">“Goodnight,” I said.</p>
<p class="western">Once he’d left I went to the bathroom and rinsed my mouth out, then drank a glass of water, looking at myself in the mirror. I’ve never been able to sleep in the car, even under normal circumstances, and the man I saw looking back at me definitely wasn’t someone who’d slept in the last thirty-six hours. There were dark circles under my eyes, and I was badly in need of a shave. I didn’t much like the idea of asking one of the Erasers to get me a razor.</p>
<p class="western"><em>Look what trouble you’ve gotten yourself into now,</em> I thought, as I turned on the shower and undressed. <em>What a mess you’re in.</em></p>
<p class="western">I stood there waiting for the water to warm up, poking at the shampoo and soap the hotel had provided. Conscious thought was leaving me, and in its wake there was a dull emptiness of feeling. I went through the motions of taking a shower, got out and dried off and dressed, and there was nothing in my mind except for formless dread. The idea of the meeting in the morning kept returning to me, the image of sitting down at a table and being asked to argue in favor of my continued existence.</p>
<p class="western">I couldn’t really see the point of it. I had tried to equip the flock with some of the tools they’d need to live on their own, but that had been an ongoing process. The original plan I’d proposed had been for a minimum of eight years’ residency and training, with the possibility of an extension after that. They were still children, and I had abandoned them.</p>
<p class="western">I laid down on the bed, on top of the comforter. I had been forcing myself through the last day and a half on autopilot, and now that I was alone, the energy I had been relying on to push me through was draining away. My chest felt tight. I didn’t know what to do with myself.</p>
<p class="western">It’s entirely possible, looking back, that I didn’t really die that night, in that room, on that bed. Maybe something else happened to me there. But it was so much like the other times I died that I think that that’s what happened.</p>
<p class="western">I laid there on the bed, too tired to get up and turn the lights off. I felt disconnected from my body, from myself. Like I was dreaming, or observing myself from a long way away.</p>
<p class="western">My thoughts kept returning to the flock – what were they doing without me now? I had never left them alone for this long – the longest I’d been gone was for trips into town, and those rarely lasted more than an hour or so. What did they think had happened to me?</p>
<p class="western">It had started off as a proposal that we try training our pet weapons in a real-world setting, outside of the School. I had argued that when they were deployed, it wouldn’t be in the controlled environment we had previously been testing them in. They would be out in the real world; therefore, they needed experience in the real world. And the psychological benefits of removing them from the School would be advantageous as well. A change in environment might have benefits for their obedience, and a setting where I was the only handler present would not only be more like the atmosphere of future deployments, it would build their trust in me.</p>
<p class="western">Which I had now handily destroyed by vanishing.</p>
<p class="western">But they had known, I realized, that as safe as we might have felt in that house, that we were all still under constant threat of what they thought would be the School finding us, and what I knew would be the School calling us home. I had thought that they would have me bring the whole flock back at once, and not for years to come. I had thought I’d have more time with them – more time to plan, more time to teach them about the world.</p>
<p class="western">The flock had known for years that our time at the mountain house would be finite, that someday we would have to go on the run. I had planned for that – do you think I wanted to bring them back to the School?</p>
<p class="western">What I had done, in proposing this experiment, was buy them time – time for me to plan for their escape, time for me to plan my argument against their termination. I had only gotten them two years of relative freedom, and now everything was collapsing around me.</p>
<p class="western">I wanted to hope that someday I’d see them again, and someday they’d forgive me. But I had vanished without even saying goodbye.</p>
<p class="western">The awareness of what I had done hung over me like a weight. The air seemed colder around me, the light seemed dimmer, the background drone of the air conditioner more distant. I looked at the clock on the nightstand, and saw glowing symbols without meaning. <em>Oh hell,</em> I thought. <em>Oh, not again</em>.</p>
<p class="western">Everything in my head seemed to be coming to a stop, and I can’t say I didn’t feel a numb sort of satisfaction in that. I was drawing closer and closer to the edge of a cliff, and it was a relief to know that soon I would go over it, that things would stop and I’d be free. This strange and awful thing was happening to me again, but what did it matter? The end was almost here.</p>
<p class="western">I don’t know how long I laid there like that. It seemed to go on and on forever, until I doubted that there was anything else to the world – somewhere I had gone wrong, and now I was here, outside of time.</p>
<p class="western">But I woke up in the morning – the overhead light still on, still laying on top of the comforter – to one of the Erasers setting a cup of coffee on the dresser. I fumbled for my glasses and discovered that it was the younger one, who smiled awkwardly at me.</p>
<p class="western">“Nothing in it. Sorry. Just black.” He gestured to the cup. “Be ready to leave in half an hour?”</p>
<p class="western">“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, alright. How’d you get in here?” I still didn’t feel fully in my body, but just seeing another person made it easier to tell myself I was actually part of the real world, even if I didn’t quite believe it.</p>
<p class="western">“We have the other key,” he said. Of course they did.</p>
<p class="western">I had to force myself to think a little. The night before I’d forgotten to ask exactly who my meeting was with – if it was with only my boss, Rosalind Harrison, then things might go relatively well. She was the one who’d approved my plan in the first place. But if the meeting was with the whole supervisory board, my chances of a good outcome were much lower.</p>
<p class="western">“Who’s going to be there?” I said. “At the meeting. Is it just Harrison? Do you know?”</p>
<p class="western">He looked at me with patient incomprehension. “No, I don’t think so,” he said. “I know Pritchard will be there, but Harrison... I don’t know.”</p>
<p class="western">The way he said her name was like he’d never heard it before, like he didn’t know any such person. That wasn’t overly odd, I tried to convince myself as I drank the coffee (it was terrible, by the way). She didn’t have much contact with the Eraser program anyway, maybe he didn’t know the name because of that. But I had to wonder – what if she’d been fired, in the intervening years? <em>That</em> did not bode well for me, especially if she’d been fired without my being told about it.</p>
<p class="western">I didn’t bother to ask the veteran about Harrison, when I saw him. I didn’t think he’d have an answer that would satisfy me, for one thing, and for another I couldn’t trust that he wouldn’t report back to his superior that Doctor Batchelder was asking odd questions. The younger Eraser might well forget the whole interaction.</p>
<p class="western">So I just let them take me back to the School – there was an interesting moment at the gate, when I pointed out that I hadn’t exactly brought my employee ID with me to go grocery shopping, and thus couldn’t prove that I was, in fact, the Jeb Batchelder who worked there. They printed me a new one, and I was late to the meeting.</p>
<p class="western">The Erasers escorted me right to the door of the conference room and watched me walk in, which I can tell you was not terribly reassuring.</p>
<p class="western">It wasn’t Harrison in there – it was a man I only vaguely recognized, but at least he was alone. There were a few papers scattered on the table in front of him, but he wasn’t looking at them.</p>
<p class="western">“Hello, Jeb,” he said warmly. “My apologies for the short notice. Please, sit down.”</p>
<p class="western">I took a seat across the table from him.</p>
<p class="western">“You’re probably wondering why we called you back early,” he said. “Well, I have good news and I have bad news, and I didn’t want to give you either over the phone. The bad news is that you’ve been reassigned back here for a little while. The good news is that the project isn’t being terminated. We’re just – changing some priorities.”</p>
<p class="western">“What do you mean?” I said. My mouth was dry. I wished I’d asked for some water. I couldn’t quite remember his name – it was at the tip of my tongue.</p>
<p class="western">“The proposed operational timeline, for one thing,” he said. “Things are being accelerated a little bit.”</p>
<p class="western">“I asked for eight years,” I said, before I could stop myself.</p>
<p class="western">“Two was about all I could get you,” he said. <em>Pritchard</em>, I thought. His name was Pritchard. We’d met before – he didn’t work in my department, or at least he hadn’t when I had left.</p>
<p class="western">“I appreciate that. I just – don’t think it’s enough time, sir,” I said. “They’re not ready for deployment yet.”</p>
<p class="western">“They don’t have to be,” said Pritchard. “We need you here to assist with the Eraser project. You’ll still be able to observe the avian-human recombinants remotely. We’re just moving to a hands-off mode for them.” He waved one hand in the air. “The basics will still be taken care of, don’t worry about it.”</p>
<p class="western">That wasn’t the same as being able to be there for them in person - it didn’t even come close - but I couldn’t say that. “Oh. What, uh, what about the Eraser project?”</p>
<p class="western">“You’ll find out the details in the lab,” he said. “I’ll walk you over, and the team will bring you up to speed. But I think you’ll be working on group dynamics, for the most part, if that helps. Did you have any other questions?”</p>
<p class="western">I thought about a grave, somewhere in the desert, and how short the distance was, as the crow flew, between the School and Colorado. How quickly the Erasers could deploy, and how defenseless the flock would be against them. If I just said the wrong thing, everything would fall apart, this fragile peace they seemed to be offering me.</p>
<p class="western">I was so tired.</p>
<p class="western">“Where is everyone?” I said. “Did Doctor ter Borcht transfer to another project or something?” When I had left, he had been working out of a facility near Washington, D.C., but he’d been a regular enough presence at the School that I’d expected to see him in the halls.</p>
<p class="western">Pritchard looked at me oddly. “I thought you’d have heard. He... doesn’t work here anymore.”</p>
<p class="western">“What do you mean?” I thought I remembered, around the time I left, hearing about some trouble he’d been involved in back east. But it hadn’t come up in any of my briefings while I was in Colorado, so I’d assumed it wasn’t important.</p>
<p class="western">“Itex terminated their relationship with him,” he said. “You won’t be seeing him around anymore.”</p>
<p class="western">I thought about shallow graves again. When you have the kind of money, the kind of power, that Itex does, making your problems disappear is easy. Had ter Borcht become a problem?</p>
<p class="western">Had I?</p>
<p class="western">“Oh,” I said. “I see. That was my only question. Is it still the same lab space as when I left?”</p>
<p class="western">“No,” he said, and gathered his papers together before standing up. “They moved a few months ago; they’re in one of the new buildings now. I’ll walk you over.”</p>
<p class="western">“Thanks.” New buildings? When I’d left they hadn’t been planning to expand the campus, and I didn’t think I’d been gone long enough for a plan for new buildings to make it all the way to completion. They should’ve still been trying to get approval from the head office.</p>
<p class="western">I trailed after him through the halls, feeling out of place without so much as a clipboard to carry. Clipboard, hell – I didn’t even have a <em>car</em> anymore, I’d let the Erasers force me to abandon it in Colorado, though they’d let me keep the keys. I had the things in my storage unit, but that was <em>it</em>.</p>
<p class="western">I didn’t ask Pritchard where Harrison had gone. I was afraid that, whatever he might say, he would definitely make a note of the question, and that it would become ammunition, a thing to point to as a reason to wind down my involvement in the avian-human recombinant project. I was under stress, they would say; they could see it in the way I acted. It was the humane thing to do, to reduce the workload I was expected to carry. And I would never see my children again.</p>
<p class="western">I had to face up to it. Whatever was happening to me wasn’t just going to go away on its own. It was going to keep happening, over and over. Maybe someday it would stop, but I couldn’t be sure of that. All I could do was try to minimize the damage.</p>
<p class="western">I was already on thin ice. I told no one. I waited, and hoped it wouldn’t happen again – and for a while, it didn’t.</p>
<p class="western">I was a ghost haunting my own life. I wandered through a world I recognized a little less every day, searching for something that would bring me back to a reality I’d recognize. I never found it – if I had, I wouldn’t be writing this.</p>
<p class="western">Any story I can tell you about those years will in some sense be false; it will be diminished by the act of putting it into words.</p>
<p class="western">How can I tell you about the years I spent slowly losing touch with the world, becoming ensnared in a net of possibilities? What could I say about that time that won’t be reductive?</p>
<p class="western">There was nothing left in my life that was absolutely certain, nothing I could rely on as a touchstone.</p>
<p class="western">I was lost.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Chapter 2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p class="western">It won’t do any good, I think, to try and give you the full story of what happened to me during those years. None of it is clear to me – what I remember, I remember in disjointed fragments - and in any case I hope it won’t be relevant to you.</p><p class="western">But there were dreams. Phantoms. Shadows in the dark.</p><p class="western">I died again and again during those years. Always, thankfully, while I was alone. But I felt more and more like I was dreaming – I tried to take it in stride, to live with it, but it wears on the sanity to live that way, to spend every moment expecting to die.</p><p class="western">I didn’t feel real anymore.</p><p class="western">It made me reckless, I think, as much as it wore me down.</p><p class="western">The flock had only two years of peace in the mountains. That was all I could get them, though I begged for more time. I remember that clearly.</p><p class="western">“No,” Pritchard told me, early in the spring of 2005. Six months earlier, he had quietly replaced me as the supervisor of the avian-human recombinant project. I had let it happen. “We’re staging a kidnapping – testing their ability to track and extract a target. We’ll be using the youngest one as the victim. Should give them a little more incentive to succeed.”</p><p class="western">“<em>Angel</em>?” I said, before I could stop myself. “She’s a little girl – she’s six years old – what if she gets hurt?”</p><p class="western">“It’s your job to make sure she won’t get hurt,” he said. “I want you to make sure we send our best.”</p><p class="western">I told him I would. And I chose the squad of Erasers that abducted my youngest daughter from the only home she’d known.</p><p class="western">In the years that followed that abduction, I died too many times to count. In my memory they blur together, one tangled knot of misery. Again and again, stripped of context. Death was the only continuity I had.</p><p class="western">But I remember the last time very well. Not how I got there. How I felt.</p><p class="western">The flock and I were in a restaurant – I remember a hot smell of food in the air, and how dark it was.</p><p class="western">There were men with guns there; they wanted to take Max somewhere. To hurt her.</p><p class="western">I was a little distracted by the fact that one of the gunmen had the muzzle of his pistol cozily pressed to my ribcage. I don’t know why he thought I would make an effective hostage.</p><p class="western">I remember Angel talking to him, saying, “Put the gun down and just walk away.”</p><p class="western">“Sure,” he said, and shot me.</p><p class="western">I can’t offer you a grand insight into the experience of getting shot. The gunshot was loud, I could tell you; of course it was. It didn’t hurt right away, and at first I thought that he’d fired at one of the kids. But they all looked fine.</p><p class="western">“Jeb,” Max said. I could hardly hear her, my ears were ringing so badly. “You’re bleeding.”</p><p class="western">I looked down. She was right – my shirt was torn where the barrel of the gun had been, but around that burnt circle, my shirt was slowly turning a deep wine red.</p><p class="western"><em>This isn’t supposed to happen to me</em>, I thought – I had never managed to break myself of the conviction that I was the main character of reality, that nothing bad could really happen to me. Death couldn’t do it. <em>Not like this.</em></p><p class="western">I sank into a nearby chair. All of a sudden I felt cold, and there was an awful pain in my chest, deep inside. <em>Not the lungs</em>, I thought – I was still breathing, shallowly – <em>the stomach</em>? I couldn’t tell.</p><p class="western">I wished for a glass of water. There was one abandoned on the table next to me, but I didn’t dare take it. I hadn’t paid for it.</p><p class="western">“Max and Dylan are on the phone with 911,” someone said. I tried to focus, forced myself to look up from the tablecloth. It was Nudge, standing close by, looking at me with worry on her face. “They’ll be here soon.”</p><p class="western">“Thank you,” I said. It came out slurred. The pain seemed to be lessening. I felt like I’d taken a step back from my body. I leaned on the table, and I felt the tablecloth slip against the polished wood beneath. I was <em>so</em> cold.</p><p class="western">“Tell Max,” I said.</p><p class="western">“Tell her what?” said Nudge – in the background I could hear someone else (Dylan?) saying, “Keep him awake and talking until they get here.”</p><p class="western">There were a thousand things I wanted to say to her.</p><p class="western">“Tell her I’m sorry,” I said. Now it was getting hard to breathe. My shirt was wet with blood, and if I could’ve taken it off I would’ve. I tasted metal. Maybe I was expecting to.</p><p class="western">“I will, once she’s off the phone,” said Nudge. “But you’re gonna be okay.”</p><p class="western">“I loved you all so much,” I said. And died.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Chapter 3</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p class="western">When I woke, the first thing I noticed was that I felt like I’d just run a marathon. I seemed to be in a bed, though, which was better than coming out of one of my spells crumpled on the floor.</p><p class="western">“Oh, good, he’s coming out of it – Roland, give me a hand.”</p><p class="western">I knew that voice, knew its owner. Hadn’t heard it since he called to offer his sympathies on the occasion of my son’s death, all those years ago. But I had once known him very well.</p><p class="western">I forced my eyes open – the lights in here, wherever “here” was, were dimmed, but still intensely bright to my light-starved retinas – and tried to place myself in time and space. It might have been minutes or hours since my last memory, and from the few clues I could piece together I was in some sort of medical facility.</p><p class="western">The smell of disinfectant, the distant sounds in the halls – the thought that sprung to mind was that I was in the infirmary at the School, but that couldn’t be. It was gone. I had watched it burn down.</p><p class="western">And then again, I had just died again, and here I was, seemingly alive.</p><p class="western">“Welcome back to the land of the living,” said a kind, familiar voice.</p><p class="western">I blinked into the light. (Where were my glasses?) I couldn’t think of anything better to say. “I’m pretty sure you’re dead.”</p><p class="western">There was a stifled laugh. “Thankfully, no. I have a few questions to ask you, though – do you think you can sit up?”</p><p class="western">I pushed my hands out to the sides, feeling for the bars that ought to be at the sides of the bed. Bars located, I pushed myself up slowly to a sitting position. The room was still blurry, mostly beige. I hoped someone had held on to my glasses.</p><p class="western">The two people standing at my bedside were watching me with what seemed to be concern, judging by their body language. I knew them both, I realized – the tall one, running to stoutness and wearing a neat sweater-vest, was Roland ter Borcht, and the shorter man next to him, leaning on his cane, was another old friend, Hans Gunther-Hagen. I had worked with both of them, and honestly, I was comforted by their presence when I woke up disoriented in a strange place. If I had to put my life in someone’s hands, I’d pick one of them.</p><p class="western">Roland spoke first. “I’m sure you know the drill – we need to make sure you’re not cognitively damaged. I’ll ask you a few quick questions to that end. Physically, you’re fine. You had a tonic-clonic seizure about twelve hours ago. You’ll probably experience muscle tenderness for some time and possibly mental confusion, which is what we’re testing for. Please speak up if you have any more symptoms.”</p><p class="western">All three of us had essentially been recruited straight from medical school by Itex. None of us had ever practiced, and consequently our bedside manner was somewhat lacking. It showed most in Roland, who had never been gregarious – Hans had been forced to learn how to engage socially by the visibility his disability gave him, and I’d never been as bad socially as they had.</p><p class="western">Hans rolled his eyes. “Let’s move on. What’s your name?”</p><p class="western">“Jeb Batchelder.”</p><p class="western">“Very good. Your date of birth?” Roland asked.</p><p class="western">This switching off during conversation had grown to be a habit when the three of us shared a lab. We’d been asked on occasion if we were siblings. Vivian Darkbloom – a colleague of ours in those days – had once remarked to me that watching the three of us interact was like watching half a conversation instead of a full one.</p><p class="western">It seemed like it had been a lifetime since I’d seen them.</p><p class="western">“June 7<sup>th</sup>, 1954.”</p><p class="western">“Good. Where are you?”</p><p class="western">“It looks like I’m in the infirmary at the School.”</p><p class="western">“Yes, you are.” Hans shifted his weight, the rubber of his cane’s tip squeaking minutely against the tile floor. “What is the current date?”</p><p class="western">I couldn’t for the life of me remember.</p><p class="western">“I’m not sure.”</p><p class="western">“That’s fairly normal after a seizure,” Hans said kindly, but the look he passed to Roland made me feel, for the first time, shut out of the bond we’d shared.</p><p class="western">“One last question,” said Roland. “Who are we?”</p><p class="western">“Roland ter Borcht and Hans Gunther-Hagen,” I said. “You’re my friends.”</p><p class="western">Hans smiled. “You passed,” he said.</p><p class="western">“Now, there’s no reason to keep you here any longer,” said Roland. “I can’t promise you a wheelchair on the way if you need one, but I can offer you lunch in the cafeteria.”</p><p class="western">“That sounds great.”</p><p class="western">To say that I had questions would be putting it mildly.</p><p class="western">Roland helped me up; Hans handed me back my things. They waited in the hall while I got dressed. I didn’t recognize the clothes, but that didn’t really surprise me. The glasses, at least, were the same.</p><p class="western">I met them outside the doorway.</p><p class="western">“If the seizure was last night,” I said, “why was I in the infirmary? Just monitoring?”</p><p class="western">“In a way,” Roland said casually. “You weren’t oriented to your surroundings, but you agreed to stay overnight or until you were.”</p><p class="western">Hans glanced at me. “He means you didn’t know who we were.”</p><p class="western">“Or who <em>you</em> were. Or where.”</p><p class="western">“Jesus,” I said. It was all I could think to say – it had never been this bad before. I had always been able to hide it from others. “Who found me? Where was I?”</p><p class="western">“You were in your office,” said Roland. “Don’t ask me what you were working on, I don’t know. I was the one who found you – I was going to make another pot of coffee, and I stopped to ask if you wanted some.”</p><p class="western">I put my hands over my face for a moment – not the most well-considered gesture when you wear glasses – and breathed out slowly.</p><p class="western">Half an hour ago, I had been bleeding to death in a restaurant. Now I was in a building I had seen burn to the ground, talking to people I thought I’d seen for the last time.</p><p class="western">“<em>Fuck</em>,” I said.</p><p class="western">“The first thing I did was call the infirmary,” Roland said. “Then I sat next to you on the floor until you came out of it. I moved some of your furniture around, so you wouldn’t – hurt yourself. You’ll have to put it back.”</p><p class="western">“That’s fine,” I said. It had been so long, I couldn’t remember what my own office had looked like. I wanted to cry.</p><p class="western">“Come on,” said Hans. “You need to eat something.”</p><p class="western">“Sure,” I said.</p><p class="western">The way to the cafeteria seemed familiar, but I couldn’t be sure. It was in the same building, on the same floor, as the infirmary. That seemed to be right.</p><p class="western">It wasn’t busy when we got there, but Roland took one look at me and said, “You look like shit. You two go sit down and I’ll wait in line. Coffee?”</p><p class="western">“Please,” I said.</p><p class="western">Hans sat down at a table by the window, and I followed him. The chairs were definitely the same as I remembered – molded plastic, vintage 1985. Outside the desert stretched to the mountains on the horizon. There were a few light, wispy clouds high up in the sky, and I remembered Max telling me, once, with childish solemnity, that flying through a cloud was a lot less pleasant than it looked.</p><p class="western">I missed her. I missed all of them.</p><p class="western">Roland came back sooner than I had expected, with a tray, and set a Styrofoam cup of coffee in front of me. “No milk, two sugar?”</p><p class="western">“Close enough.”</p><p class="western">“And a tuna sandwich – they’re not set up for lunch yet and it was all they had. Sorry.” He set another cup down in front of Hans.</p><p class="western">“That’s fine,” I said. I felt hollow inside. The last thing I wanted to do was eat.</p><p class="western">There was a muffled buzzing noise, and Roland took a cell phone out of his pocket. I was glad to see that those hadn’t changed since my last memory. “You wait here,” he said. “I’ve got to take this.” He walked off.</p><p class="western">Hans looked at me across the table. “Go ahead,” he said. “I’ve already eaten.”</p><p class="western">I unwrapped half the sandwich and just looked at it. I genuinely couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten, or what it had been. I should’ve been hungry, but I wasn’t.</p><p class="western">I heard footsteps behind me and half-turned to see who it was. No one I recognized – I could say he was a man my age, but there were a lot of men about my age at the School. His hair was dark and he had a kind face.</p><p class="western">“Franz!” Hans said. “How are you?”</p><p class="western">“Well enough,” said the man with the kind face. He glanced at me. “Oh – hello, Doctor Batchelder. Franz Mueller. It’s been a while.”</p><p class="western">“Nice to see you,” I said.</p><p class="western">I sat there, numb, looking at my coffee while the two of them talked.</p><p class="western">“I wasn’t expecting to see you today,” Hans said.</p><p class="western">“I wasn’t expecting to be here,” Mueller said. “Something set off the radiation alarm in the lab last night, so of course I got paged -”</p><p class="western">“Doesn’t that happen all the time?”</p><p class="western">“Well, yes,” he said. “It’s sensitive, it’s supposed to be, so sometimes it gets tripped by something happening down the hall in one of the other labs. But that’s always easy enough to pin down as the cause. Takes a few hours at most to compare notes and figure it out. But whatever happened last night – I’ve never seen anything like it. They called me at home, it was that bad.”</p><p class="western">“Well, couldn’t it just have been an error with the sensor? What did they call you in for?”</p><p class="western">“They cross-checked it twice before they called me,” he said gloomily. “No, they called me in because it wasn’t just a one-time spike in the readings.”</p><p class="western">“What was it then? Did it happen again?”</p><p class="western">“Not exactly, no. It’s <em>still</em> happening. Whatever it is, it’s still here. And we can’t track it down. I’ve got people out looking with the handheld detectors. I just came for some coffee.”</p><p class="western">“If you think that’ll help, and you’re sure it isn’t a mechanical failure,” Hans said. “You know I don’t really understand it the way you do.”</p><p class="western">“It’s still good just to be able to, you know. Talk about it with someone, even just for a minute.” Mueller tossed back the rest of his coffee. “I’ve got to go back and see how they’re doing.”</p><p class="western">“It’s always good to see you,” said Hans. “Take care – I’ll see you later, yes?”</p><p class="western">“Sure, sure.” He left.</p><p class="western">Roland came back a few minutes later, after I had finished my coffee. “Feeling any better?” he asked.</p><p class="western">“Not really,” I said.</p><p class="western">“Why don’t we go to your office,” Hans said, “and we’ll help you clean things up a little.”</p><p class="western">“Okay,” I said. Would it look the way I remembered? No matter what it was like, I thought it would feel like walking into a stranger’s room. Like being a voyeur in my own life.</p><p class="western">As it turned out, I never did find out what my office looked like.</p><p class="western">We turned a corner, and I saw her in the distance. And I knew her at once – I would know her anywhere – my daughter, Maximum Ride.</p><p class="western">“Oh, this is just too much,” I said.</p><p class="western">“What?” Hans said from behind me.</p><p class="western">I can’t say I’ve always done right by Max. I’ve tried, but that doesn’t mean I’ve succeeded. Seeing her start to establish a life outside the School had made me feel like, if nothing else, the damage I had done could be overwritten. That she could have a life without me in it. A good life.</p><p class="western">A life that wouldn’t bring her back here.</p><p class="western">It’s always hard for me after I die. Coming back is difficult; figuring out what I’ve missed this time is hard to do without the risk of revealing that something’s wrong with me. If Max was back here, back at the School... what had happened while I was gone? What had I failed to prevent?</p><p class="western">I felt unsteady on my feet. I leaned heavily on the wall.</p><p class="western">“Max is fine,” said Roland, next to me. He touched my shoulder lightly. “She got back this morning. Everything’s all right.”</p><p class="western">“No, it isn’t,” I said. I felt light-headed, seeing her walk towards us, chatting with the person next to her – seeing her back here, in this place she had hated so much. “None of this is right.”</p><p class="western">“Look,” Hans said gently, “you’re still not yourself -”</p><p class="western">“You’re right. I’m not.” She had cut her hair short since the last time I saw her. She was still a teenager, still a child, but what Roland said made me think that she’d already been running missions for Itex. That she was being forced to do the task she was created for: to save the world.</p><p class="western">I know Max. I have known her since the day she was born. I raised her for twelve years. I knew what she would do, what lengths she would go to, to stay free, to stay away from the School.</p><p class="western">I could not imagine what awful things they must have done to her, to keep her here, under their control.</p><p class="western">“Then we can’t have you out wandering the halls.” The friendliness had left Roland’s voice. His hand was still on my shoulder. “Come on. You can collect your things from your office, and then go home for a while. I’ll tell Pritchard you’re out.”</p><p class="western">“I’m not going anywhere,” I said. Max turned down another hallway and I lost sight of her. Everything seemed to shimmer in front of me. It was all fading into the familiar sensation that I was dreaming, that I was dying and would soon wake up again. “This place isn’t real. You’re not real. I’m just going to wait until whatever’s going to happen happens.”</p><p class="western">There was a pause. I heard someone’s shoes squeak on the tile. The sound seemed to come from a long way away.</p><p class="western">“Hans. Go get Pritchard,” Roland said. “Go <em>now</em>.”</p><p class="western">And I heard a voice from behind us: the man from the cafeteria. Mueller. I turned to face him, and Roland turned with me.</p><p class="western">“You!” said Mueller.</p><p class="western">“We’re busy, Franz.” Roland’s voice was tight.</p><p class="western">“No, you’re not.” He sounded almost cheerful. Maybe <em>relieved</em> would be a more precise word for it. “We tracked down that theta radiation spike I was telling you about, Hans.”</p><p class="western">“I said, we’re <em>busy.</em>”</p><p class="western">Mueller pointed at me. “It’s you,” he said. “You, my friend, are positively glowing with theta radiation. Red-hot. I’ve never seen anything like it.”</p><p class="western">“You can tell me about it later,” said Hans.</p><p class="western">“What the hell do you mean, theta radiation?” I said. Nothing here was real, but that was still the fakest thing I’d heard so far.</p><p class="western">Mueller smiled. “Well, Hans,” he said, “there won’t have to be a ‘later’. Because all three of you are going to come to my office, and we’re going to figure out <em>why </em>you, Jeb, set off the sensor from across campus. I want to know what you did last night.”</p><p class="western">“Sure,” I said. I think Roland might have been surprised I agreed so placidly; I heard him breathe out slowly. But I had had worse deaths than this before. “Where’s your office?”</p><p class="western">“Follow me,” he said.</p><p class="western">And the three of us did.</p><p class="western">His office, it turned out, was in another building, one I wasn’t familiar with. The three of them escorted me the whole way there, so I didn’t get a change to look around, but the School, by and large, didn’t seem to have changed very much since the last time I saw it. I couldn’t decide whether that was better or worse than if it <em>had</em> changed. Is it worse to come back to a place that hasn’t changed, or to one that you don’t recognize anymore?</p><p class="western">“Here we are,” said Mueller, and ushered us inside.</p><p class="western">As offices go it wasn’t bad – a little crowded with all four of us standing around, but it was quiet and, I noticed, not shared with anyone. Mueller slipped into the worn chair behind the desk, and motioned for me to sit in the chair in front. “Sit, sit,” he said. “We might be here a while.”</p><p class="western">“I hope not,” said Roland.</p><p class="western">“If I’m radioactive,” I said, “why am I here and not in isolation or something?”</p><p class="western">“You’re not radioactive, <em>per se</em>,” said Mueller. He looked at Roland. “He’s been like this all day?”</p><p class="western">“Like what?” I said.</p><p class="western">At the same time Roland said, “Yes. He... had a seizure late last night. I was the one who found him.”</p><p class="western">Mueller raised his eyebrows. “Fascinating. About what time, would you say?”</p><p class="western">Roland shrugged. “Right around ten o’clock, I think. I was working late. I went to make coffee, then went to offer him a cup.”</p><p class="western">“Ten o’ clock,” Mueller repeated. He looked at me. “What do <em>you</em> remember?”</p><p class="western">“Well, I don’t fucking remember being in my office,” I said. “Look. None of this matters. None of this is real. Do you want to hear the last thing I actually remember before I woke up? I got shot. I was dying. I bled to death in some shitty restaurant and then I woke up here. <em>That’s</em> what I remember.”</p><p class="western">Roland looked appalled. Hans had gone very still.</p><p class="western">Mueller looked... interested. He leaned forward a little. “Has this ever happened to you before?”</p><p class="western">When something bizarre happens to you, the natural urge is to tell someone about it, like telling them will retroactively make it real. This is a futile hope. People don’t actually want to hear your weird story, and the fact that you want to tell it makes them think less of you. You want to tell them about it, but you can’t. And here was this stranger, asking to hear what I had to say.</p><p class="western">“Yes,” I said. “It has.”</p><p class="western">I told him everything – everything you’ve read here. Once I got started, it poured out of me like blood from a wound – and the more I said, the more interested he looked. Roland looked progressively more horrified; Hans dragged a chair over from the corner and sat down.</p><p class="western">“And I woke up here, this morning,” I said, when I got to the end. “I know what it feels like when I’m about to die; I’m just waiting for it to go ahead and happen. Can I have some water?”</p><p class="western">“Of course.” He opened one of the drawers of his desk and handed me a bottle of water.</p><p class="western">I was waiting for him to pass judgment on me. This was the moment I had feared for so long. Someone had found out. My secret was revealed.</p><p class="western">“Is that all?” he said, when I had drunk half the bottle of water.</p><p class="western">“Yeah,” I said. “That’s it.”</p><p class="western">Mueller smiled. “In that case – my name’s Franz Mueller, and I study parallel universes. Nice to meet you.” He put out his hand and, surprised, I shook it.</p><p class="western">“But you’ve met before,” said Hans.</p><p class="western">“No, we haven’t,” I said. “I mean, I saw him in the cafeteria earlier, but not before that. What the hell do you mean, parallel universes?”</p><p class="western">“Just that,” he said.</p><p class="western">“You don’t seriously <em>believe</em> him, Franz,” said Hans.</p><p class="western">“Can’t fake theta radiation,” Roland said. “And, Hans – unless you know something I don’t, we never did this chip project Jeb was talking about. I think we have to believe him.”</p><p class="western">Mueller looked pleased. “It’s the <em>time</em> that really tells me you’re the real deal,” he said. “The radiation alarm in the lab went off at ten o’ clock last night. That late at night, there was nothing else happening on campus that could’ve tripped the sensor that badly. We spent all morning figuring that out.”</p><p class="western">“Couldn’t it be some sort of, I don’t know, problem with the machine?” said Hans. “These things don’t <em>have</em> to be connected.”</p><p class="western">“Oh, we considered that,” Mueller said. “But there’s two reasons why we think that’s not it. First, it wasn’t just a little spike. It maxed out the big detector we use in the lab. So we don’t know how much theta radiation is actually being emitted. We can’t measure it. Second, it wasn’t just a momentary spike. It was still happening two hours ago. That’s something like eleven straight hours of enough theta to max out the detector.”</p><p class="western">“What happened two hours ago?” said Roland.</p><p class="western">“It finally fried the big detector,” Mueller said. “It just wasn’t designed to run continuously for that long and take that much radiation. Fried the circuits. So after that we were working on tracking the source with the little handheld detectors. Which is when we managed to track it down to you, Jeb.”</p><p class="western">“Okay,” I said. I drank from the bottle of water. “What does any of this mean for me?”</p><p class="western">“Well, I’ll start at the beginning,” said Mueller.</p><p class="western">“Oh, Jesus,” Roland said.</p><p class="western">“Parallel universes are real,” Mueller began. “We’ve known that for sixteen years, though we’ve had some inkling that they might exist for longer than that. We built the first theta radiation detector in the late eighties.” He stopped for a moment and looked past me, off into the distance. The air conditioner hummed.</p><p class="western">“That was lucky, as it turned out,” he went on, “because in 1990, the tape showed up.”</p><p class="western">“What,” I said, “like a videotape?”</p><p class="western">“Exactly. A videotape from another world.” There was a distant, dreamy look in his eyes. “It’s the only other thing that’s done something like this to the big detector. And it was much weaker.”</p><p class="western">“Tell him what was on the tape,” Hans said.</p><p class="western">“Video footage. Of the avian-human recombinants. They hadn’t been born yet, not in 1990, but there was evidence that proved it was them.”</p><p class="western">“And video of us,” Roland said.</p><p class="western">“I was getting to that part,” Mueller said. “Yes. There was video of, of alternate versions of some Itex employees. That isn’t really important – what’s important is what they told us.”</p><p class="western">“They wanted us to change the whole tenor of the program,” Roland said. “Everything about our planned handling policies. They advised more of a soft touch. What’s worse is that their plan worked.”</p><p class="western">“What they reported had happened,” Mueller said, “what they wanted us to avoid, was – total loss of control over the kids. Ending in containment failure.”</p><p class="western">That sounded familiar to me. And if any place <em>did</em> have control of the flock, it seemed to be this one. However they’d done it. Why else would Max be running missions for them?</p><p class="western">“How are they?” I asked. “The kids?”</p><p class="western">“We saw Max in the hall earlier,” Hans said to Mueller. “He reacted – poorly.”</p><p class="western">“She’s fine. I saw her debrief when she got in. Nick was with her on this one, he’s all right as well.” Mueller paused to think. Nick – that could only be Fang. “Jim is recovering from eye surgery – and the others are still much too young to see action.”</p><p class="western">“Their names,” I said. <em>Jim</em> had to be Iggy. “What are their names?”</p><p class="western">“What, they aren’t the same for you? Well, there’s Monique – her birthday was last week, she’s twelve. Then Gabriel and his sister Angel.” He raised one eyebrow. “They sound familiar.”</p><p class="western">“Their names are wrong,” I said. “But other than that, yes.” All of them accounted for.</p><p class="western">“Good, good.” He looked pleased in an avuncular sort of way. “Part of what we did differently was encourage them to bond to a caregiver figure – one person rather than a rotating staff. Which was you, I’m afraid.”</p><p class="western">“Of course it was,” I said. That much was the same, at least. I kept waiting for things to fade around me, but they stubbornly refused to. “What’s that have to do with theta radiation? How does that tie in to this whole parallel universe thing?”</p><p class="western">“I’ve heard this one before,” said Roland, “so I’ll just cut it short – sorry, Franz. They – his team – want to send a message to another universe. One as much like ours as possible. But the more alike two universes are, the harder it is to open a gateway between them. Isn’t that right?”</p><p class="western">Mueller nodded.</p><p class="western">“The long and short of it,” he said, “is that, just as Roland says, it takes an immense amount of energy to access parallel universes. We’ve developed a transmitter that can theoretically do it – based on the principle that, since the opening of a dimensional gateway <em>causes</em> a local spike in theta radiation, if we can create the spike ourselves, opening the gate becomes easier.”</p><p class="western">He met my eyes. “This is where you come in. We can generate theta radiation ourselves, but the process is inefficient and risky. You, on the other hand, at least seem to be generating it at a relatively consistent rate. And we think – <em>I</em> think – that we should be able to use that emitted radiation to power the transmitter. The process would be relatively simple, I think.”</p><p class="western">“What exactly is involved in the process? I mean – does it hurt?”</p><p class="western">“It’s painless,” Mueller said. He glanced at Hans. “At least in theory. You seem to be generating theta radiation passively, perhaps in response to certain stimuli. By simulating the correct stimulus, we should be able to provoke an increase in the radiation you generate, then siphon it off to power the transmitter.”</p><p class="western">“Should?” I said.</p><p class="western">“He’s going to kill you,” Roland said. “Not permanently, but that was the impression I got.”</p><p class="western">“What? No,” said Mueller, looking a little pained. “No – I mean – <em>no.</em>” He looked at me closely. “Would you have any objection to my taking a little of your blood?”</p><p class="western">“That depends on what you’re going to do with it.”</p><p class="western">“Burn it,” he said, opening one of the drawers of his desk and pawing through the contents. He set a disposable scalpel, still in its foil packaging, down on the desktop and went back to pawing through the drawer’s contents. “I mean, not here, we’ll do it in the lab, but it won’t be very much and we’ll be using it right away.”</p><p class="western">“Well, at least tell him what it’s <em>for</em>,” Hans said quietly. “I think he should know that much, don’t you?”</p><p class="western">“For one thing, I’m not sure how much technology we actually share,” Mueller said. He shut the desk drawer and looked directly at me. “Where you come from, there’s really no serious investigation into parallel universes?”</p><p class="western">Even given how the last few hours of my life had gone, that caught me off-guard. “I mean, there is,” I said carefully, “but it’s not <em>practical</em> investigation like what you’re doing.”</p><p class="western">“Haven’t had any suspicious videotapes show up lately?” said Roland.</p><p class="western">“No,” I said, “I mean, I guess there’s people who think parallel universes are real, but no actual <em>evidence</em> like the kind that you have.”</p><p class="western">“So, no.” Mueller paused for a moment. “This is hard to explain. The gist of it is that the human body – the body of any living thing – has its own background level of theta radiation. For reasons we still don’t understand, certain activities – like opening a dimensional gateway – create a massive spike in theta radiation output.”</p><p class="western">“Like a reactor going critical,” Roland said. “You have nuclear reactors, right?”</p><p class="western">“Of course he does,” said Hans. “Let the man speak.”</p><p class="western">“Thank you. Yes, nuclear radiation is a useful metaphor in some ways, I guess,” Mueller went on. “It’s not exactly the same, but close enough to get the point across – a more familiar comparison might be to fire.”</p><p class="western">“Radiation output,” I said. “That’s where you lost me.”</p><p class="western">“Yes! Sorry,” he said. “As your cells are born, age, and die, they generate this background level of theta radiation. Observed as a system, the level seems to be nearly constant throughout life. When you look at the individual cell, however, there’s an enormous spike at the point of death. At the level of the whole organism – and we’ve only been able to test this on animals, so the data is a little unclear – that spike occurs also.” He looked away for a moment. “Now, this is only an idea,” he began.</p><p class="western">“Oh, good,” Roland said. “Now you’re just going to confuse him with hypotheticals, <em>and</em> bore us to death.” He crossed his arms.</p><p class="western">“What’s the idea?” said Hans.</p><p class="western">“Awareness of death is what triggers it,” Mueller said, still looking away from me. “It, it’s not so much the physical death, it’s the awareness of imminent death. I think. You understand, it can’t really be tested satisfactorily.”</p><p class="western">“This is why he wants to kill you,” said Roland.</p><p class="western">“Not quite,” said Mueller. He looked back at me. “I mean, I suppose you could put it that way. But it is a little like nuclear radiation, or, or building a fire – if you get enough flammable material together -” He cut himself off and started over.</p><p class="western">“There are three ways we can do this,” he said. “It will all be done in the lab, proximity is very important. The first way is the least, the least elegant way: we simulate a near-death experience. With your agreement. I think it would be the most unpleasant way, but I think you might be familiar with the sensation?” He shrugged, then picked up the scalpel.</p><p class="western">“The second and third ways are very much alike: we take some of your blood in a little dish and burn it. The difference would be in how much we use. If we use just a little blood -” he waggled the scalpel, “- then the reaction is weaker, we may still have to simulate a near-death experience depending on how much theta radiation we detect. If we use a little more, it will be more like – if your doctor at home ever ordered you to have blood tests done, and I don’t think we’ll need to do a simulation. It depends on how much theta radiation you’re putting out when we start.”</p><p class="western">“Tell him more about the tape,” said Roland.</p><p class="western">“What about it?”<br/><br/>Roland shrugged. “You ought to know.”</p><p class="western">“The radiation levels,” said Hans. “That’s what he means.”</p><p class="western">“The tape started to decay towards background level fairly soon after it showed up,” said Mueller. “It was still, uh, ‘hot’ compared to background for years, but we think it had started to decay right after it, uh, came through. Now, we need quite a lot of theta radiation for the transmission to work, we know that – it’s why we haven’t, uh, been able to power the transmitter fully, there’s only so much you can do with traditional energy sources.”</p><p class="western">“The main limitation is ethical,” Roland said.</p><p class="western">“Yes,” said Mueller. “Theoretically – no one has tried it so far as we know – a, uh. Sacrifice, you could call it, a sizable one, would do the job. It would work. It would be monstrous even to attempt, but it would work.”</p><p class="western"><em>This whole place is monstrous</em>, I thought. <em>In every life I've lived, it’s monstrous – and yet we have our ethical quibbles anyway. It never stops us.</em></p><p class="western">“So, if I understand correctly,” I said, “you want to use the energy from the blood as... kindling, to boost the output I’m already generating. You’re not sure if I’m generating enough output to do what you need without using kindling, and you won’t know until you start working. Depending on what my output is, you might not need kindling at all.”</p><p class="western">“Yes.” Mueller looked pleased.</p><p class="western">“And then you’re going to use it to – send a message? How?”</p><p class="western">“Oh, God,” said Roland. “Don’t get him started.”</p><p class="western">“I won’t bore you with the specifics. It’s never been tested in full, but the underlying method is sound,” Mueller said. “The transmitter amplifies the energy it receives and uses it to – make a hole, I suppose, a weak spot between our universe and its closest neighbor. The transmission – in this case, the object – passes through this hole before it has time to re-seal itself.”</p><p class="western">“What object?” I said. “You said that in 1990 you found this videotape – what are you going to send, a flash drive or something?”</p><p class="western">Mueller shook his head. “No – we’re dialed in to a, uh, an arrival time of 1990. I believe they’ve narrowed things down to either a floppy disk or -”</p><p class="western">“Oh, you’ve got to be shitting me,” I said. “First you’re traveling to other universes, now you’re traveling in time?”</p><p class="western">I was not entirely joking.</p><p class="western">“It’s a one-way trip,” said Mueller. He looked a little offended. “The passage is only open for a very brief time, just enough that we can determine basic data. Like the year.”</p><p class="western">“So yes,” Roland said. “For a given definition of time travel.”</p><p class="western">“Yes,” Mueller said. “We can’t get much more precise than the year, but we think that there’s something about that timing that’s important. So,” he shrugged, “we did our best to target that year. It was good enough for the original transmitters, why not us as well?”</p><p class="western">I was lost. “Yeah,” I said. “Sure. But a floppy disk, really?”</p><p class="western">“Believe me,” said Mueller, “we’ve spent a lot of time narrowing down exactly what information to send. They might’ve had to get a little creative with, uh, storage, with file size, but everything important will be on it.”</p><p class="western">“I think he means that floppy disks are not exactly the wave of the future,” Roland said.</p><p class="western">“That’s exactly what I meant,” I said. “And what’s this message that you’re sending? What information is that important?”</p><p class="western">“Data,” Mueller said. “Everything we’ve done since 1990. Well, not everything.” He looked down at the desk. “The original tape concentrated on the avian-human recombinant project. So we’ve done the same. Something about it is important.”</p><p class="western">“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I think it is.”</p><p class="western">“Me too,” Mueller said softly. “So. Will you do it? It’s your choice.”</p><p class="western">I thought about the flock – how I’d left to go to the store and vanished from their lives. How Fang had asked to come with me that day, and I had said no. Everything I had wanted to say to them.</p><p class="western">“Yeah. I’ll do it. Under one condition. Can I put something on the disk?”</p><p class="western">“Well... like what?” Mueller said.</p><p class="western">“You guys had a videotape from another world. I’m the only <em>person</em> you know who’s come from another dimension. Maybe I could give them some advice.”</p><p class="western">“I think you’re right. And I think we should be able to squeeze one more text file on. But before we head to the lab – did you have any other questions?”</p><p class="western">“Why send a message?” I asked. “What’s the point, if we’re doomed anyway?”</p><p class="western">“This is a dying world,” Mueller said.</p><p class="western">“They all are,” Hans said.</p><p class="western">“We can only keep the lights on for so long, even with Max and the others running missions. But what we hope,” Mueller continued, “what <em>I </em>hope we can do, is to help put off the end for a little while longer – and if we’re very lucky, perhaps even stop it from coming – but not for ourselves. Only for whoever reads that message.”</p><p class="western">“Provided they believe it,” said Hans. “We did.”</p><p class="western">“I hope they will,” I said. “I really hope they will.”</p><hr/><p class="western">I can’t be sure who will read this message. Mueller promised me that he wouldn’t, that he’d just put it on the disk without reading it. It’s not that I’ve said anything I’m ashamed of, it’s just that... well, you’ve read it. You know I’ve told you everything I have to tell, whoever you are.</p><p class="western">What I’m hoping, if it arrives when it’s supposed to, is that you’ll give this disk to whatever version of me exists in your universe. I hope that hearing from yourself will help you make some better choices in your life.</p><p class="western">I’m going to give you some strong recommendations, when it comes to the flock: give them their freedom, whether or not you think that’s in your power. Let them be themselves. They were made to be weapons, but what I refused to acknowledge until it was too late was that they’re just children. Don’t sentence them to a life of being controlled. Take them away from here.</p><p class="western">I don’t know what you’ll have to do to give them the lives they deserve. It might cost you your life; sending this message may have cost me mine. It will be worth it. I promise.</p><p class="western">The people here aren’t really my friends; they do not know me, though they think they do. They think they’re sending a message that will help your world avert global apocalypse. I’m not so sure that’s true. If you choose to do what I’m advising – who knows?</p><p class="western">What I can tell you with certainty is this: if I could go back in time, to the day I took the flock away from the School, I wouldn’t go to the safe house in the mountains. I’d take them somewhere else – I hope you know the place I’m thinking of. Somewhere they couldn’t be found. I’d take my chances, and try to give them the lives they deserved.</p><p class="western">The people who sent this message want you to use the flock as tools; they think that if they can gild the cage enough from the start, their prisoners will never dream of freedom.</p><p class="western">I don’t think that’s true. I think that freedom has a cost, and that it’s worth it.</p><p class="western">You and I will never meet. I’m sending you a message and hoping that you’ll understand it. All I can do is hope. I can’t know what you’ll choose to do, in the end.</p><p class="western">I did the wrong thing, too many times to count. I’ve tried to tell you about it, a little bit. I hope you can learn from my mistakes. I hope you’ll have the courage to act on what you’ve learned... and do the right thing.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I started the first draft of this fic in September 2013. I picked it back up this summer after coming across the document on an old flash drive.</p><p>I’ve been writing fic about Jeb for a long time, and it’s always fun to slip back into his head for a while. This isn’t the fic I would have written in 2013, but I like how it turned out.</p><p>My endless thanks to a <em>number</em> of people from Tumblr and the Maximum Ride Rewrite Discord server for just, like, liking the posts I made about this fic during the months I was working on it. I couldn't possibly list everyone, so... thank you all. </p><p>Special shout-out to Tumblr user fishmech, who suggested the term "theta radiation".</p><p>Towards the end of the fic, I’ve borrowed some ideas about alternate universes from the way Charles Stross handles them in his Laundry Files series. <a href="https://cryingalonewithfrankenstein.tumblr.com/post/636644568164696064/heres-an-excerpt-from-charles-strosss-novel-the">Here's a relevant quotation</a>.</p><p>This fic begins in one AU and ends in another. There are a number of differences from canon in each. The last part of this fic is set in the same AU as <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/21167807">this fic from 2011</a>.</p><p>You can read the first draft of this fic <a href="https://cryingalonewithfrankenstein.tumblr.com/post/623142637945356288/">on my Tumblr</a>.</p><p>Thank you for reading. It means a lot to me.</p></blockquote></div></div>
</body>
</html>